Hi there! It’s been a while.
In late October, I was away at an audiovisual art festival, then I came back home with a cold, and the next week I was with capsulitis or something similar on my right thumb and I couldn’t use the mouse, it still hurts a little. I guess that I need to rest. Maybe I should look for something to do that doesn’t involve using a computer.
These weeks I’ve been thinking about several things. As I said, I was at an audiovisual art festival, it was a small festival in the city where I grew up. It’s a small city—A Coruña, around 245,000 inhabitants—so the art scene is small. We don’t even have a contemporary art museum. We used to have one, but now it’s permanently closed. It was open only for around 20 years, that’s not much.
While I was at the festival, I noticed that almost all the people there were somewhat involved in the festival or in art. There was hardly anyone who was just an ‘audience’. I saw filmmakers, artists, curators, art students, journalists, etc., and friends and relatives of all of them. I didn’t see anyone who was there without being involved in some way. Perhaps in the children's screenings it was different—I don’t know, I wasn’t there—, but I got the feeling that very few people were there just for the sake of it.
That made me realise that at many small festivals, even in the biggest cities, there isn’t really an audience, only ‘shareholders’. Many screenings and art events are more of a meeting point for artists than ‘public’ events, even though anyone can buy a ticket—some festivals are expensive, but those are usually the mainstream ones in which you can find all kinds of people.
Meeting other artists and cultural workers is nice, but it makes me sad to think that the public only goes to the big festivals and that everything else is some kind of inbred party. That’s a huge problem for which perhaps we’re all partly to blame.
At this kind of audiovisual festival, you don’t even see the usual film buffs that are always in the more mainstream or genre film festivals. It puzzles me when I mention experimental cinema to people who love films, or people involved in the film industry in some way, and they tell me that experimental is only ‘for the initiated’, as if it were a religious sect that you can only understand if you have been brain-sucked by its leader. I think that this ‘fear’ of experimental film and other contemporary art forms has to do with the idea that there’re high art and low art—I hate that distinction.
A lot of experimental films and music, and other non-commercial art forms, have to do precisely with the idea that everyone can make and understand art. You don’t need to be a music scholar to enjoy a Merzbow gig, you just have to get rid of your preconceptions about what is and isn't music. You just have to feel. Many experimental films, music, etc. have more to do with emotions than with anything intellectual, so why do these prejudices against experimentation exist?
It’s partly the fault of the industry, which insists on hiding ‘experimental’ artworks in a separate box as if they weren’t made using the same artistic medium. In part, it's also the fault of many institutions and artists who prefer to see themselves as the chosen ones, as opposed to other types of venues/artists who work for the mainstream industry or in more commercial genres.
A curious detail in the case of the festival I was talking about is that it was held in an old commercial film theatre, a place I used to go to as a child. It was the oldest film theatre in A Coruña. It was closed in 1999 and for many years it was a big clothing shop—my city is the hometown of Inditex, the owners of Zara, and they own a lot of buildings. This year someone—I don’t know who—reopened it as a multifunctional space. It’s not a film theatre again, it’s more like a bar in which they hold different kinds of events. So experimental films can be screened there, but only now that it’s no longer a film theatre.
I’ve never understood why experimental films are something totally different from all other films and can only be seen in very specific spaces—museums, art galleries, etc. For me, a film is a film. Obviously, we all like some things more than others, but there’re traditional films that are very difficult to understand and experimental films that even 3-year-olds enjoy. Saying something is ‘experimental’ means nothing in terms of how intellectually challenging it is, but most people take the term as a signal of some kind of barrier.
I have no idea what the solution would be, and I don't think this is being read by the general public anyway, but I think we can all do our bit to spread those films, albums, etc. that aren’t so well-known or that are usually relegated to small circuits.
Art and peanuts
This month something else has happened to me that has given me food for thought. A public institution offered me €80 to acquire one of my films for their public archive. This is less than what they pay for one screening.
I told the person who wrote to me that maybe we could organize a panel about precarity in the experimental film field. Their response was that they didn't think the institution would accept that proposal because it was a bit, as we say in Spanish “like throwing stones against your own roof”. They meant that it was against the interests of the said public institution. It doesn't matter which one it is, because almost all of them behave in the same way.
I already knew that the answer would be something similar, and I don’t blame the person in the production department because I know that they have a really low budget, but if we can't even talk about this at a public institution, which is precisely the one that should take care of our rights, where are we going to talk about it? In the living room of my house without anyone hearing us, I guess.
It’s not the first time that something similar happens to me. As an additional note to understand that this is a widespread problem, I’ve been asked to show some of my works for free in some well-known contemporary art museums. You know, the kind of museums that buy €800,000 paintings. Most of us aren’t Warhol or Serra, I don’t expect €800,000 for any of my artworks, but they should have some decency and don’t ask for free labour.
I used to be very naïve and said yes to everything, but now I get really pissed off. Most of the time, the issue isn’t that the institution doesn't have money, it's that they prefer to spend it on flashier things. They believe that there’re first and second-class workers. I’m a third-class worker, sometimes a slave.
On top of that, most artists and cultural workers don’t want to speak about this for fear of being punished in some way, but if I can't make a living from my work anyway, what does it matter to me if someone bans me for complaining about the conditions under which we are forced to work?
It’s frustrating to see how in many institutions, festivals, art events, etc. everyone is paid except the artists. I'm sick of being asked to work for free or being offered peanuts instead of wages. Maybe I sound like a broken record, but it's really depressing and we all should be shouting about it!
What about Vimeo?
The other thing that’s on my mind right now is something that I read a few days ago. I’m on a mailing list for experimental filmmakers, and this week someone asked for alternatives to Vimeo.
The reason for this question was that Vimeo said in their Vimeo 2022 Annual Shareholder Letter that they “are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube”. It seems that what we want from Vimeo, and why it became popular, isn’t the same as what Vimeo wants.
Searching for more information, I found out that some content creators are already having problems with Vimeo due to unexpected price hikes. Some people have also told me that there has been a gradual inclusion of commercials/branded content into Vimeo Staff Picks and that they have changed categories to exclude the ones related to experimental stuff and include things like “weddings”. I didn’t notice any of that—I haven’t made any films in the last 2 years, so I don’t use Vimeo as much as I used to.
I haven't had any problems with Vimeo so far, but if that's their business vision, I guess they'll end up kicking us all out. On the other hand, almost nobody likes YouTube, and alternatives like PeerTube don't seem to be the best solution either.
One of the main issues with PeerTube is that if the administrator of the instance closes it you’ll lose all your work, sometimes without a warning. We could argue that Vimeo or YouTube also can kick you out or change their policies without a warning, but a commercial platform is usually more ‘stable’ than a random guy paying a server. I don’t trust commercial platforms, but I think you get the picture.
If anyone can think of real alternatives, please tell us about them.
And talking about digital platforms, I don't go into what's going on with Twitter because the billionaire is so irrational I wouldn't even know where to begin.
Books and TV shows
Last week I started reading Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow. I haven’t finished it yet, but a lot of what they explain is somewhat related to how hard is to make a living as an artist. They mainly talk about how most commercial digital platforms are monopolies that profit from writers, musicians, etc., stealing their money and their rights.
Also last week, I watched the last episode of The Good Fight. It may seem something completely unrelated, but when I was watching it I thought that there’re only two things in this horrible capitalist world that make sense to me: art and activism. The Good Fight is quite mainstream, but it’s also really well-written and funny, and it talks about a lot of the current social and political issues. I’ve mentioned this show before, and the last couple of episodes were great. I’ll miss it.
But an ending is always the beginning of something new, so cheers to beginnings.
That’s all for now. I’ll try to return to the initial rhythm of this newsletter, which was once a month. Please share this if you find it interesting. I’m doing this in my free time, so shares and likes are important to feel that this is of some use. And fight for your rights!
You can find most of my artistic work at null66913 and an EP that I published recently at Bandcamp. You can also find me on Twitter, as long as we don't wake up one morning and it has completely disappeared.
Have a nice week :)